Google has officially announced its takeover of Xively Internet of Things (IoT) business from LogMeIn this Thursday. It has cost Google $50 million. 45 Xively employees are also expected to join Google as a part of the takeover. This deal is being seen as a part of the measures taken by Alphabet in order to keep up with Amazon and Microsoft in the public cloud business. Compared to the $1 billion per quarter revenue from Google Cloud Platform, public cloud, and G Suite portfolio of productivity apps, Amazon Web Services generates more than $5 billion quarterly revenue. The way these clouds provide the opportunity of working with data directly from devices with internet access has become quite popular these days.
Now, Xively will allow the companies to do a lot more, like connecting new devices, managing them remotely, and, most importantly, transferring data from these devices into other systems. The list of customers of Xively boasts of big names like Halo Smart Labs, Lutron, and New England BioLabs.
A revenue of a massive $3 million and a whopping $13 million of expenses were booked by the division in LogMeIn’s 2017 fiscal year.
Through this acquisition, Cloud IoT Core will gain deep IoT technology and engineering expertise, including Xively’s advanced device management, messaging, and dashboard capabilities. – Antony Passemard, head of product management for IoT and Pub/Sub at Google Cloud
During an appearance at Goldman Sachs’ technology and internet conference in San Francisco earlier this week, Diane Greene, Google Cloud CEO, appreciated & praised the importance of the Internet of Things. While talking with Goldman Sachs analyst Heather Bellini, she said, “IoT is a pretty interesting area.”
LogMeIn had previously acquired Xively in 2014. Back then it cost them $12 million.
